Ezra Pound Quotes

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.

The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.